After the ban

Gone are the pre-match executions. Gone are the vetoes on leather jackets and weather-forecasting. Now, shaving, music and Bollywood are the talk of Kabul. Three years after the Taliban were ousted, Jason Burke meets the students, footballers and pigeon fanciers putting a smile back on the face of Afghanistan

Dusk in Kabul, and the sky is turning purple over the hills that rim the horizon around the city. Fluorescent lights flare green and red above a crowd and a stage. In the photograph, the crowd is fluid, its movement blurred by the long exposure. What the camera cannot capture is the wonderful, ethereal sounds of Farhad Darya, the legendary Afghan musician who had returned from exile in Canada to perform for the first time for years at the national stadium in Kabul this May.

Six years before, I had sat on the stadium's concrete steps on a Friday afternoon. It was a pleasant summer's day, a weak sun lit the grey terraces, and the sky was the washed-out, eggshell blue peculiar to Kabul. Hawkers moved among listless spectators. I watched as doctors amputated the hands of two thieves. Then a man was made to squat by the penalty spot and was shot in the head. Once the blood and brains had been cleared away, there was a football match between teams from Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad.

In the winter of 2000 I was back in the stadium. This time, a woman was executed. She had been convicted of battering her husband to death with a hammer, a crime that I remember thinking would meet with a similar punishment in many countries in the world, including the US. She crouched in her blue burqa, its fringe tugged by the breeze, looking over her shoulder like a nervous child. I remember hearing the long metallic scrape of the bolt on the executioner's AK47 being drawn back, clearly audible in the hush, and I can remember the three rounds that rang out, the dust that kicked up as the first two travelled through the woman's head, and then the fragments of skull that flew forward.

Those days are gone. Two weeks ago Afghans voted in a presidential election, pretty much the only more or less free and fair poll ever held in the country. Holding the election was largely symbolic, but wonderful to see nonetheless. Most people voted on traditional lines - for whoever their village headman or husband or father determined. But at least it was an election.

There are no longer executions in Kabul stadium. And many of the seemingly extraordinary restrictions the Taliban imposed on the capital have gone, present only in an odd sort of reverse image, like a photographic negative, when people do what was previously banned.

Kabul has been transformed since the days when the Taliban were in control. In those days, traffic was minimal. A few old Soviet-built Volgas or imported Toyota Corollas bounced over the pitted streets. There was one half-decent restaurant where huge piles of steaming pulau and kebabs were served and senior Taliban officials sat on long greasy cushions with their catamites and their automatic weapons beside them. There was one hotel with six functioning rooms. The polytechnic was a minefield. At night, the intermittent electricity flickered on and off in a few favoured sections of the city. The rest was left in chill darkness.

In contrast to today's bars, restaurants and thriving expat social scene, the international presence in the city was limited to a few NGOs, the UN, a handful of reporters and an increasing number of Arab, Pakistani or Central Asian militants. Often I was the only Western journalist in the country. Afghanistan was a decrepit global cul-de-sac.

The Taliban's rule in Kabul, from 1996 to 2001, is now generally considered the epitome of fundamentalist Muslim repression. But the Taliban regime and its seemingly irrational social regulations can be better understood if seen in the context of Afghanistan in the mid- to late Nineties.

For all their failings, the Taliban brought security to many areas where there was none. Impositions that were shocking in the cities were not impositions at all in the vast majority of Afghanistan. In the dusty hill villages of Paktia or Oruzgan province, of Ghor or Faryab, women had never gone to school or travelled without a burqa. Nor was the ban on televisions much of an issue. There weren't any.

The Taliban's security meant that when, crippled by an enormous hangover, I left a wallet containing my passport and $1,500 on a bus, it was returned intact. It meant you could hail a cab and go virtually anywhere, provided you took the precaution of first checking in with the local warlord or Taliban official (often the same person). I slept in villages, military bases, the occasional fly-blown hotel, or in chai khannas, the roadside inns where tea and food (chai and khanna) are served to travellers. In one, just outside the town of Qalat on the road between Kabul and Kandahar, I woke at dawn to find everyone, guests and staff, lined up in the dust of the road for dawn prayers. I lay wrapped in blankets and watched them. It was an insight into the depth of local piety. Imagine a Travelodge on the M4 emptying into the car park for prayers at 4am. This was not fundamentalism or extremism. It was simply an expression of a faith that articulates every part of life. It was also an example of something that is often forgotten in analyses of the Taliban and of Afghanistan: the profound difference between Kabul and the rest of the country.

No one in the West took much notice of the Taliban until they arrived in the capital and began imposing their infamous bans - on weather forecasting, representations of living things, leather jackets and 'Western hairstyles', pigeon racing, kite flying and most other forms of entertainment. Yet the reasoning behind this extreme rigour deserves understanding and even, controversial though it may be to say so, a degree of sympathy.

Many Taliban had seen their families destroyed, their fathers killed, their fields deliberately despoiled, their culture splintered and their homeland sucked into a welter of violence. And if they hadn't witnessed it themselves, they had been told during their childhood in their stinking, seething refugee camps in Pakistan about the devastation wrought by the war with the Soviets in the Eighties. The attraction of the clear certainties of a rigorous interpretation of Islam to those steeped in such chaos is easy to comprehend. They believed that all that had gone wrong in their lives could be attributed to modernity, to newness, to change. They wanted a revolution in the original sense of the word, a turning back of the clock. There was a blackness, a trauma, at the heart of the Taliban movement. Outside the Ministry of Religious Affairs, I once saw a painted slogan: 'Every breath is a breath closer to death.' A year later it had been replaced with: 'Throw reason to the dogs. It stinks of corruption.'

There was a perversely logical rationale behind the bans. The Taliban imagined the life they had lost as an idealised version of rural tribal society. That life, with its supposed purity and social justice, could be enjoyed once more if everybody followed the Shariat, the corpus of Islamic law, particularly where it intersected with local traditions that were threatened by change. And if people didn't want to, then for the greater good of all, they needed to be forced to.

Thus all the injunctions: women could not go out without a close relative (effectively preventing them from working), men had to wear beards of a specific length, anything that detracted from prayer or religious observance had to be shunned. Secularism, cosmopolitanism, gender equality (and rule by non-Pashtuns) all had come from Kabul. And while the provinces had suffered terribly during the Soviet war, Kabul had done quite well, with big aid programmes, building schemes, cafes and cinemas, girls in miniskirts, imported films. The city dwellers were seen as collaborators. Kabul, to the rural Taliban, was Babylon and its women were the whores. And the Taliban behaved accordingly.

As the years of their rule progressed, and their international isolation deepened, the Taliban drew closer to the Gulf-based strands of Islam followed by men like Osama bin Laden. Even as late as 1998 the Taliban were almost astonishingly simplistic. Bored, waiting for an interview with the minister for religious affairs, I once asked his guards, a detachment of religious police charged with enforcing the minister's harsh edicts, if I could join them. They looked me up and down and then conferred. Of course, they said, if I really wanted to. There followed another debate. One came over and shyly asked if I was a Muslim. No, I told him and asked if that was a problem. He looked grave and spoke to his colleagues again. A minute later he returned, all smiles. No problem, he told me, if I came with them to the mosque for dawn prayers the next day I could convert and there would be no trouble at all.

There were, of course, far darker elements to the Taliban's regime. Arbitrary beatings were regularly meted out. Ethnic minorities, especially the Hazaras from the centre and west of the country, were cleansed from much of the city. The plains to the north were effectively razed. Once they had been the bread basket for the capital, spotted with beautiful villages set among orchards and vineyards. By the time of the war of 2001 they were wastelands, populated by thin, haunted, hunted people.

Things are better now, as these photographs reflect. At least, they are in Kabul. Women are still dying without medical attention because their menfolk refuse to take them to hospital, but large numbers of girls are educated, there are women police officers, men can have their beards cut, the university is full, the mines have been cleared from the polytechnic, there are international flights to destinations throughout Europe and Asia from the city airport, cinemas have reopened to show the hugely popular Bollywood musicals (and Western pornography). Though in most of Afghanistan the misogyny and repression of centuries past continues almost unaltered, this is a start at least.

The shame is that the attention of the world is now drifting elsewhere. Last November, I wandered through the hospital in Kandahar, the main city in southeastern Afghanistan. The sound of steady sobbing echoed through empty rooms. In one wing I found children dying of malnutrition.

A handwritten sign stuck up in a corner told me I had found the 'therapoetic feeding centre'. The bathos was terrible. Two years after their country had been invaded by the world's richest and most powerful state, five-year-olds were starving to death.

A few days later I drove out to the village of Sangesar, where the Taliban had been founded 10 years ago. I spoke to the locals gathered for Friday prayers at the mosque where Mullah Omar, the reclusive one-eyed cleric who led the movement, once preached. Did they want the Taliban back, I asked. No, they said. They wanted a well.

During Taliban times there was a man who rode an old Russian motorbike around a rickety wooden 'wall of death' in Ariana Square in the centre of Kabul. He rarely drew much of a crowd and it was hazardous work. The bike was barely fast enough to maintain the momentum to keep him from crashing to the floor. I saw him a few times. I wonder what happened to him.

· Afghanaid is an independent UK-based charity that has worked alongside Afghan communities for two decades. For more information or to make a donation, visit afghanaid.org.uk